Author: The Conversation

The volatile nature of space rocket engines means that many early prototypes end up embedded in dirt banks or decorating the tops of any trees that are unfortunate enough to neighbour testing sites. Unintended explosions are in fact so common that rocket scientists have come up with a euphemism for when it happens: rapid unscheduled disassembly, or RUD for short. Every time a rocket engine blows up, the source of the failure needs to be found so that it can be fixed. A new and improved engine is then designed, manufactured, shipped to the test site and fired, and the cycle…

The TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced millions of people to the idea of a holodeck: an immersive, realistic 3D holographic projection of a complete environment that you could interact with and even touch. In the 21st century, holograms are already being used in a variety of ways such as medical systems, education, art, security and defence. Scientists are still developing ways to use lasers, modern digital processors, and motion-sensing technologies to create several different types of holograms which could change the way we interact. My colleagues and I working in the University of Glasgow’s bendable electronics and sensing technologies research group have now developed a system of…

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to head to space on Dec. 18, 2021. With it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets and accomplish many other scientific goals. I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera – or NIRCam for short – aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole. To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a…

Apple’s plan to scan customers’ phones and other devices for images depicting child sexual abuse generated a backlash over privacy concerns, which led the company to announce a delay. Apple, Facebook, Google and other companies have long scanned customers’ images that are stored on the companies’ servers for this material. Scanning data on users’ devices is a significant change. However well-intentioned, and whether or not Apple is willing and able to follow through on its promises to protect customers’ privacy, the company’s plan highlights the fact that people who buy iPhones are not masters of their own devices. In addition, Apple is using a complicated scanning…

What is my IP? It’s an odd question in most people’s minds, yet it’s one of the top ten most-searched questions on Google. Those who know what an IP address is will already know most of these searches are coming from people who understand what they’re searching for. But for the rest of us a more relevant question might be: what is an IP address? Across the globe there are billions of computing devices that connect to the internet. To communicate, each device needs an address, just like our homes. Our home address is typically structured along the lines of “number, street, city, postcode,…

On Sept. 15, 2021, the next batch of space tourists are set to lift off aboard a SpaceX rocket. Organized and funded by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, the Inspiration4 mission touts itself as “the first all-civilian mission to orbit” and represents a new type of space tourism. The four crew members will not be the first space tourists this year. In the past few months, the world witnessed billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launching themselves and a lucky few others into space on brief suborbital trips. While there are similarities between those launches and Inspiration4 — the mission is being paid for by one…

In partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban, Facebook has released its first pair of smart glasses, offering wearers the ability to capture photos and videos without even needing to pull out their phone. The glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories, are now available for A$449 and are functionally similar to devices already on the market, such as SnapChat Spectacles. They allow users to capture images and video and upload them to their social media accounts, via an app called Facebook View. Users will be able to share content on Facebook and other Facebook-owned platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as non-Facebook apps such as…

Sometimes major shifts happen virtually unnoticed. On May 5, IBM announced Project CodeNet to very little media or academic attention. CodeNet is a follow-up to ImageNet, a large-scale dataset of images and their descriptions; the images are free for non-commercial uses. ImageNet is now central to the progress of deep learning computer vision. CodeNet is an attempt to do for Artifical Intelligence (AI) coding what ImageNet did for computer vision: it is a dataset of over 14 million code samples, covering 50 programming languages, intended to solve 4,000 coding problems. The dataset also contains numerous additional data, such as the amount of memory required…

Elon Musk announced the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor. Predictably, social media filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots where everything goes horribly wrong. As troubling as the robot futures in movies like I, Robot, The Terminator and others are, it’s the underlying technologies of real humanoid robots – and the intent behind them – that should be cause for concern. Musk’s robot is being developed…

Through social distancing mandates, lockdown measures and restrictions on gatherings and services, the pandemic has brought about widespread changes to how modern societies function. And everyone has become more reliant on smartphones. One study found smartphone use increased by 70 per cent during the first few months of the pandemic. And a recent Canadian survey found more than 40 per cent of respondents are spending even more time on their phones this year. The reliance on digital technologies, including smartphones, has increased tremendously because of the need to do everything from home — working, studying, staying connected, reading the news and interacting with…